As it turns out, Smash isn’t the only game in which Cloud is the worst.
With a total of four different options presented to you, it was inevitable that at least one of the Dragon Souls in League of Legends’ tenth competitive season would be over-tuned relative to the others.
In this guide, we’ll be taking a look at each of the four Dragon Souls—and ranking them from best to worst.
Ocean Drake
Being the only Drake to immediately require a gameplay adjustment, it seems obvious that Ocean is the single most game-changing of the lot. A flat 3 percent (formerly 5) missing health recovery every 5 seconds is nothing to snuff at, and the passive regeneration both enables your team to sustain through fights, and to stay on the map longer.
The Dragon Soul version of the Ocean Drake is largely the same, but with an active element to it; your champion regenerates a flat amount of health and mana every time you inflict damage to an opponent, increasing proportionally to your combat stats. This applies in weaker amounts when in combat with neutral monsters, and generally presents a huge boon for both squishy carries and tanks with questionable mana pools.
The insane amount of raw sustain from the Ocean Dragon Soul is often insurmountable, and when you factor in the persistent Ocean Drake stacks on top of it, the opposing team will have a very difficult time taking sustained fights or even trades.
Infernal Drake
Renowned for being the best Drake to have in both the early and late game, thanks to the raw combat stats it provides (5 percent additional attack damage and ability power per stack), Infernal’s Dragon Soul is similarly combat focused. Much like the plain stacks of the Drake itself, the Dragon Soul increases damage dealt.
Rather than be strictly stats-based, the Infernal Dragon Soul is essentially a watered-down version of the old Elder Dragon buff. A physical or magic damage attack amplifier, it turns every attack and ability into a miniature area-of-effect, with a solid amount of base damage augmented heavily by combat stats.
The effect isn’t game-ending, but should be more than enough to push your winning team over the edge when it comes to taking teamfights and skirmishes. At the end of the day, however, no amount of damage can compensate for composition weakness and the like, so while the Infernal Dragon Soul is incredibly useful, it is still second to Ocean.
Mountain Drake
In Season 9, Mountain Drake gave bonus true damage to both neutral objectives and enemy structures. This season, however, the buff gives flat resistances. This makes everyone on your team harder to kill, and offers a little more leniency in build paths for more steadfast champions—for example, with guaranteed extra resistances, your tankier teammates could opt to just build health instead.
Resistances are both underrated and an afterthought for a reason, given the amount of itemisation and champion kit answers to tankier builds. However, the Mountain Dragon Soul provides a massive boon in the form of a Malphite-passive-esque shield. Every 5 seconds that you don’t take champion damage (of note is that it will re-apply while you are kiting an enemy, since you are theoretically taking no damage despite being in combat), a fairly hefty shield refreshes on your champion.
This buff allows squishies to be a bit more carefree in their positioning, and helps nullify some of the frontloaded burst and assassination potential that many meta compositions and champions have.
Underwhelming, yet still incredibly helpful at times, Mountain Dragon Soul slots neatly into our third place. Some extra padding is nice, but if your team is ahead enough to be in a position to have secured four Elemental Drakes, it’s unlikely that the shield is strictly necessary.
Cloud Drake
Cloud Drake is incredibly difficult to gauge, due to the fact that the statistics it offers are often somewhat ineffective in teamfight scenarios, which are usually what League games come down to.
The statistics that the Drake itself gives—additional cooldown reduction on your ultimate ability, ignoring the cooldown reduction cap—are almost always useful, since you can theoretically fight more often. This is very useful in skirmish-heavy compositions, but if the enemy team is either wise or respectful, you are still only using an ultimate ability once per fight.
The Cloud Dragon Soul has the old effect of the Drake—bonus movement speed, but this time persisting through combat—combined with former rune Nimbus Cloak, granting additional speed on ultimate cast. The effect does synergise well with the stacking passive of the Cloud Drakes, but we are still hard-pressed to consider it too game-defining. An extra burst of speed can indeed help most champions find—or escape—their targets more easily, but compared to the bigger guns of the Dragon Souls, Cloud falls flat yet again.
